US MASTERS COUNTDOWN: PHILIP REIDhears Pádraig Harrington explain why Augusta intimidates him

IN THE basement of Pádraig Harrington’s home in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, you find a high-ceilinged room – designed exactly to his own specifications – which could only belong to a professional golfer who has done well for himself. The trappings of success, as it were. Here, on dark days and nights, deep in the cellar of his home, is where he can pound away to his heart’s content on a swing that, so far, has won three major championships.

It’s not all perfect: one or two cracked panes of glass testify to the odd errant shot. But it’s here, as much as any time spent on the range or on the golf course, that dreams are built. Invariably, these days, those dreams are centred around the majors, the championships which are like caviar when compared to the gruel on offer at everyday tournaments. Once you get a taste for major glory, everything else is second best. Harrington likes dining at the top table.

Next week, on the hallowed turf of Augusta National, Harrington will go in quest of the third leg of a career Grand Slam and in search of his fourth major title. It is nigh on eight months since the last major, when Harrington’s defence of the USPGA title at Hazeltine finished with an ugly final round 78 that dropped him down to tied-10th, eight shots adrift of South Korea’s Y E Yang.

Past history.

Augusta is the gold standard for Harrington. There’s something about travelling down that tree-lined avenue off Washington Road every April, something that gets the hairs to stand on the back of his neck. It’s not just the place, it is the challenge it demands from those players fortunate enough to have received one of those special invites dispatched only to the game’s current elite and those past masters who once upon a time conquered this ultimate test of a man’s touch and fortitude.

“When you get there, you obviously know you are getting a golf course in pristine condition. But it’s the test on every shot, that’s the true essence of Augusta National. Say you miss a green and have a chip off a tight lie into the grain . . . you’ve got to land it in the right place, it’s got to check properly, (and) you get it fractionally wrong and all of a sudden you’re 10 or 15 feet away from the hole. Little things like that just add up during the week.”

He adds, “Let’s put it this way. If you can play golf at Augusta National, you can play golf anywhere. So, I think I go back to Augusta every year with the thought, ‘wow, if I can handle this golf course, I can handle anywhere’. I’m using it as the ultimate judge of the quality of my golf game . . . to be honest, I think a lot of my practice during the year, it’s the golf course I imagine in my head.

“Augusta would be the golf course that intimidates me the most. Always has. There is not a shot at Augusta where you are not under pressure, all the way through the golf course. You can’t name the hole out there that doesn’t put you under a little bit of stress and pressure. But I like that. It is 72 holes of who deals with it . . . I have always played based on fear.

“A lot of where I am going with my game at the moment is to do with how realistic I can make my practice to bring it to the golf course so that when I am on the golf course, I am not reacting to that fear as much as I should. (But) I am never going to get away from it. That is my nature.”

Harrington, with top-eight finishes in his two outings at the WGC-CA Championship and The Transitions before his pre-Masters finale at the Houston Open, has good reason to anticipate a strong challenge at Augusta: he has had two top-five finishes on Mackenzie’s masterpiece, in 2002 and 2008, but it was after his tied-seventh place finish there in 2007 that he left firmly believing he had it in him the qualities required to win a major. By July of that year, he had collected the first of back-to-back claret jugs.

Now he travels to these major gigs with greater expectation, and with greater baggage too. In Augusta, it is the 15th hole that so often has proven to be his Achilles heel. It is the hole that provides Harrington with his personal baggage. Like in 2007, when he couldn’t get his head around the par five at all – he started with a triple-bogey eight in the first round, followed by a birdie, then a double bogey seven and finally a bogey six. He was five-over-par on that one hole in the tournament, yet only finished four strokes behind the champion Zach Johnson.

“We carry our own baggage on every golf course. Everybody does. Ben Hogan said in one of his book, The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, there’s always one or two holes on a golf course that you don’t like. So you play those holes accordingly, adopting what might be a totally different strategy to everybody else. You just don’t like the tee shot or whatever. Every golf course is like that.”

So, what mindset does Harrington take to the 15th hole as he prepares for an 11th visit to Augusta? “The 15th? I still stand on 15 thinking this is a birdie opportunity, 100 per cent. I stand on the tee thinking this is one of the good opportunities to make birdie on the golf course.”

If he can find a way to conquer the 15th, to send his lay-up shots to an area of the fairway that doesn’t leave him with an approach off a downhill lie, then Harrington knows that the sky is the limit and that he may yet find a way into the champion’s locker room.

In each of his 10 previous visits to Augusta, Harrington hasn’t even had a sneak look inside the door to the most elite room in the clubhouse.”Even though I’m not a superstitious person, I’d wait to have earned it (the right) rather than go in there. I’d take that sort of attitude, ‘let’s try and win it before I cross that boundary’.”